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Luck, Faith & Fate: The Story of a Beginning!

“Can anything be sadder than work left unfinished? Yes; work never begun.” –Christina Rossetti.

I had never been a very secretive person and I always shared anything going in my mind and my future plans with anyone with an appetite to listen to me. (Ya! I talk a lot) I honestly, don’t believe in the concept of not saying anything about my future plans to anyone until I have begun or half done. As my mom says, people will jinx it and then you will not succeed.

If you have read “The Secret” it goes on to say that the universe doesn’t understand the negative aspects that we associate with things or situations, it only hears what you want (or don’t want) and gives it to you. So if you say, “I don’t want this meeting to be on Tuesday” the universe will interprets it as “I want this meeting to be on Tuesday”. With this same logic I tell as many people as possible about my start-up plans because even if they think or wish “Ankit shouldn’t succeed in this” the universe will inadvertently interpret it as “Ankit should Succeed in this”. Also many a time people give out some small insight which may or may not help you but in my case it has definitely helped me a lot.

The Faith:

I came across Sir Alok Rodinhood Kejriwal, in NDTV’s Young Turks and wondered how cool it would be for me to sometimes feature in that show. I was in college back then. After graduating in commerce and 2yrs of working as an M&A Analyst my partner & I finally quit the job because we wanted to start something of our own. We didn’t know what to do, where to start from and what idea to pursue. In fact we didn’t know anything. The only thing we had was FAITH in our own abilities and that we would work our asses off to do anything we believe in. Quitting the job was the fire under our asses we required.

Comes 31st August 2012, I guess the first Rodinhood’s open house in NSE and my first ever too. I just had a simple idea, an online site wherein I will buy the second hand phones directly from consumers. Post the event, while walking outside, I went across to talk to The Rodinhood himself & ask him whether he encourages only ideas to be discussed or talked about in the event. To my surprise he liked it so much that he kept it as the main event for the next Open House known as ‘Idea for Ideas’ (You can read about our exploits & idea here)

The Luck:

In the event, we came across Abhinav Sarangi, IIT & IIM alumnus, someone who did a similar business in Bangalore successfully and later sold it. Through that event we came to know about The Playce, an awesome co-working place, and also got rent-free 2 months of working space from them in their contest. Eventually from The Playce we came across Weekend Ventures, wherein one goes from idea to Minimum Viable Product in 54hrs. Our idea was one of the top 7 out of the 15 ideas and eventually stood third overall. The best part about the event was that one of the mentors of the event Mr. Sudarshan Narayan, liked our idea very much and we have ever since been in touch with him about how could we take the idea further and if the results come out positive we will soon be launching the business in a “Proof of Concept” mode (as he being the seed investor) thus helping us to provide a stronger case while asking for the first round of funding (Hopefully).

The Fate:

“I don’t believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.” – Buddha

People always ask me what if all this fails? And I answer back saying that If I succeed, I will earn my first crore before you earn yours and even if I fail I am 23 I can start-over and use this experience to start something new, better and more valuable. Also a failed person tries harder to succeed the second time than a person who has never failed.

When we look back at the past few months, every other month the pace of work doubles and a part of our luck shines. We are working like never before and we are confident enough that pretty soon our dream will see the day of the light and we will make hay while the sun shines.

10 Comments

Great to hear about your success Ankit. Good luck on the exciting journey ahead.

And Feel free to reach out if you think I can help you with anything. The trend of this week on Rodinhood has been about celebrating failures, and I will glad if my numerous failures on the way to building PriceShred can help you.

I remember you guys 🙂 I didn’t think much of the idea, till I came across this article yesterday about the potential value of $9 billion in unused iPhones lying around, and how business like sellcell.com dont focus on the transactions per-se, but in knowing what devices to buy and sell (abit like what Abhinav did) :

You have been of great help to us. As soon as we are done with our research we are definitely going to get in touch with you again. Rodinhood truly is the luckiest thing for us as everything else was an effect of attending the Open House.

Thanks for sharing the article with us. It a small sense of pride that you still remember us :P. Makes us feel good that we are leaving an impact if not selling the concept properly but we are learning to balance both lately.

Even our on going research is coming out with numbers that we can’t digest but for us also its a potential gold mine. Want to catch up with everyone at the OH in March 🙂

these kind of stories give me goosebumps. because to me, these are the ‘rodinhood stories’ that will go down in history 🙂

i remember that evening in aug when you suggested ‘the big idea’ theme. i remember when you presented your big idea in dec. i remember abhinav sarangi giving you amazing insights like no one has ever done before!!! that was my most magical part of the evening.

and now this post proves that great ideas shape into actual ventures when like-minded rodinhooders meet!

thank you for sharing your inspiring ‘domino effect’ update with us – in less than 3 months, you’ve covered quite a bit of ground! am sure a whole lot of other rodinhooders join me in wishing Project Bazinga all the very best.

Kindly study the business model of a company called Cex they operate Buy sell exchange for used products in electronic catogery including mobile phones they have stores in 5 diffrent countries just entered indian markets below is the websitehttp://in.webuy.com/ they have offline stores in mumbai. they have scaled up business it can be a good case study for your venture .